A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

“…Aside from cutting budgets for
half of the city’s mental health clinics, Rahm Emanuel has also subjected city
workers’ pensions to the austerity knife. Currently, Illinois’ pension fund for
state employees is underfunded
by $111 billion, and Chicago’s pension fund for municipal employees has $19.5
billion in unfunded liabilities. Emanuel has proposed
phasing out subsidies to retirees’ healthcare deductibles and scaling down
cost-of-living adjustments, saying that without the cuts, he would have to
raise property taxes by 150 percent.

“While teachers, firefighters,
police officers, and other city workers have been living up to their end of the
bargain and making annual payments amounting to 9.4 percent of their total
annual salary, neither the city of Chicago nor the state of Illinois made any
payments between 1995 and 2000. At the time, financial markets were delivering
high returns on investments, and government officials in Chicago and
Springfield decided to take ‘pension holidays,’ in which money earmarked for
the pension fund was instead spent on city services.

“‘For the Daley administration,
this had the benefit of keeping city services funded and property taxes low,’
said Fred Klonsky, a retired teacher and member of the Illinois Education
Association. ‘But now, Rahm is saying that they’re not going to pay back the
money they didn’t pay in, and will cut pension benefits instead, which they’ve
already begun to do.’

“So even if Chuy Garcia won in
the mayoral runoff, how would the city pay back the $19.5 billion it owes to
workers’ pension fund? According to Phillip Cantor, chair of the Science
Department at Chicago’s North-Grand High School, a small sales tax on financial
transactions at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of
Trade (CBOT) could fund the pension shortfall just one year after being
enacted.

“‘When someone has to buy a pair
of shoes for their kid, they’re paying a 10 percent sales tax. But when I
buy $100,000 worth of stock or pork belly futures, I don’t pay any sales tax or
transaction tax,’ Cantor said. ‘We could charge a half percent on financial
transactions and not have to talk about pensions ever again.’

“Indeed, this solution was
already proposed – Illinois state representative Mary Flowers’ HR 1554,
introduced in 2013, would impose a 0.01 sales tax on all stock and derivatives
transactions within the CME Group, which includes the CBOT. The tax is
projected to bring in as much as $80
billion per year according to some estimates, and would even exclude transactions
held in retirement or mutual fund accounts.

“Klonsky, who is unable to accept
Social Security benefits for himself or through his spouse due to his status as
a retired state employee, depends entirely on his teachers’ pension as his sole
source of retirement income. He says undoing Illinois’
flat income tax rate of 3.75 percent for all taxpayers regardless of what
they earn, and instituting a progressive income tax, would go a long way to
alleviating the crisis of workers’ underfunded pensions.

“‘A housekeeper at the Hyatt
hotel in downtown Chicago pays the same income tax rate as the Pritzker family,
who owns the Hyatt hotel,’ Klonsky said. ‘This is a very, very wealthy state…
If you want to fund a city or a state government’s services, you don’t do it by
going after those who don’t have any money…’”

Teacher/Poet/Musician

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Persona

"I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense" —Albert Camus (1913-1960).